Blog & Newsletters

Report Cards Your child will bring home their quarter 2 report card today. You will find that there are a few blanks on the report card. Those standards have been left blank because they have not been assessed yet. I also attached a document that has your child’s reading level on it. I included their level from the end of 1st grade, Q1, and Q2 so you can see how much they have grown over the course of the year!

Math Workshop Mathematicians were so excited to learn about the world of measurement. Students practiced measuring the nearest inch or centimeter. The kids had a ton of fun practicing their new skills. During Reader’s Workshop the kids noticed that cm. and in. were in tons of our nonfiction books and we can better understand the size of something! The students also learned how to use measuring tape. Students collaborated and worked together to measure big lines on the rug!

Literacy During Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop we are continuing our deep dive into nonfiction. Readers have been busy learning how to navigate through nonfiction text features. If we don’t understand a word in the text, we now know that we should read on and see if we can use some of the text features to help us! Writers set individual goals to help them better their writing. We also learned how to write for an audience.

Reader’s Workshop Readers have been diving in head first to nonfiction! We have been learning to “talk the talk” of nonfiction! Before readers tart a new book, it is helpful to think of all the keywords they know about that topic. For example, when thinking about a book about tigers, “what keywords might I find in this book?” Stripes, predator, meat eater, carnivore, and fur might be keywords in the tiger book.

Thanks in advance for your understanding this week! Since I am a new teacher to the district, I have to attend a ton of valuable professional development! Which does pull me away from the classroom, but in the long run it really helps me to better my practice and provide the best instruction possible to the 2nd graders! Readers Workshop This week readers started to fill their book boxes with non fiction texts!

Reader’s Workshop Readers dove into the world of nonfiction! We looked through nonfiction books to find similarities on how the text is organized. We went on a hunt to find text features within our text, with our reading partners and then find text within magazines! 2nd graders can often identify text features (photographs, maps, headings, labels, captions, glossary, diagrams, etc.) but have a difficult time naming a purpose for the features.

Newsletter This Week Newsletter this week is short in sweet due to a very busy week with conferences and Halloween! Writer’s Workshop This week the writer’s looked at mentor texts and tried to decide which of their stories will their audience enjoy the most! Next week they will each choose a piece of writing to revise, edit and fancy up! We would love for you to attend our Author’s Celebration and hear all of the wonderful writing that has been happening in 2nd grade!

Reading Celebration We had an amazing time celebrating us growing like beanstalks. Their stamina grew so much over the last 9 weeks and it was really fun to celebrate all their hard work! We had a fun morning of eating buttery toast, an apple juice toast, and reading by “finger flashlight.” Thank you to everyone who donated supplies for our celebration! Readers gave speeches on things we can all be proud of now that we are “2nd grade readers!

Reader’s Workshop We did it! We finished our 1st unit of reading! We have grown so much as readers and are truly growing like beanstalks! We finished off our unit this week learning that authors have intentions, so we need to pay attention. We looked for moments in our mentor texts where authors wrote in powerful ways! Readers tried to figure out how and why authors might do this! We also learned that authors authors try to teach us a lesson.

Reader’s Workshop We had so much fun this week building stamina and “rolling up our sleeves” to read tricky words. We learned a few more strategies that might help us when we come to a tricky word. Vowel teams are really powerful and we have been finding them everywhere. Vowel teams are two vowels that are next to each other. After studying several words, we realized that vowel teams can make lots of different sounds!